Friday Trivia #7: Abbreviation Station

How long has it been since I did one of these trivia things? A year? And before that another year? Man, I’m slacking folks. No excuses. Hopefully, you’ll forgive me when you see the multi-layered monster I have for you this time. This one is literally years in the making.

I don’t know about you, but I’m partial to using codes to list my birds when I’m out in the field. Typically I use the four letter codes created by Pyle for use by bird-banders. You basically take the first two letters of each word and combine them to create an abbreviation. There are a few overlapping species, Barn Owl and Barred Owl are both BAOW for instance, but for a day in the field it’s fairly useful for cutting down note-taking and how often are you going to see both Barn and Barred Owl anyway? Though that would be a pretty awesome day.

Some birders prefer to use a six letter code which cuts down on overlapping species even more. For two word species, you take the first three letters in each word and splice them together. For instance, American Robin becomes AMEROB. For three word species you take the first two letters of the three words and combine those, as White-throated Sparrow becomes WHTHSP. Do you follow?

This six letter code was my preferred way of note-taking in Guatemala as there are many species with elaborate names and shortening allowed me to spend more time on the birds and less on my notes. However, it did not go unnoticed that the occasional code spelled a funny word of its own and thus, a quiz was born*.

So, finally, the rules.

You will be given a clue, the answer to which is a six letter word (Edit: I should be more clear, there are six total letters, but it might be more than one word).

That six letter word is an abbreviation of a common North American bird species, derived using the method described above

The answer to the question is not the abbreviation, but the bird species.

An example!

Clue: A resident of Benning or Bragg.

Step 2: FORTER

Answer: Forster’s Tern

Got it? Put your answers in the comments, I’ll mark them off as they come in.

And away we go….

–=====–

UPDATE: Some answers are in the comments. If you want to continue figuring out the clues, don’t look!

Spent some time listing them all out and still only managed 5 (1, 6, 10, 11 were the others) but a few more:
If a tree falls into the water…
What some birds do after the young are gone
A group of kazooists

Excellent puzzle, very cleverly done—it must have taken you forever to compose it. One issue, though: I got (1) “Roseate Tern” right off, but found myself stuck forever on (2): I couldn’t think of a bird whose six-letter code could possibly be STUPID!